W3C aims for full recommendation of HTML5 by year’s end

Gradually, imperceptibly, beneath your very fingers on the keyboard, the internet is becoming something different. Many users may never even notice the change, especially since it’s not intended to effect what you see so much as what goes on beneath the surface that lets you see it. Since 1997, the internet has hummed along on the fourth iteration of HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, the markup language that tells your browser how to display the contents of a webpage.

Now HTML 4 (properly written with a space, apparently) is on the way out, and HTML5 (no space; see how advancing technology changes everything?) could be just a few months away from being given full clearance by the World Wide Web Consortium, the primary international standards organization for the internet. HTML5 has been on the fast track, so to speak, since 2012, when the consortium, more commonly known as W3C, advanced it to Candidate Recommentdation status and announced a plan to complete further testing and approval processes by the end of 2014. On June 17, W3C official Philippe Le Hégaret reaffirmed those intentions in an informal blog post and said that HTML5 has performed well across 97,000 tests, with just 3.3 percent of tests revealing failures.

HTML5 is now in the Last Call phase of Candidate Recommendation, with W3C officials accepting comments until July 15 about changes implemented during Candidate Recommendation. The group plans to address those concerns by early fall, which will advance HTML5 to Proposed Recommendation, that final status before full W3C Recommendation. Once that status has been achieved, W3C will pull a Microsoft and turn immediately to addressing bugs in the new release: Under the same resolution that is pushing HTML5 across the finish line, HTML 5.1 is planned to achieve full W3C Recommendation by the end of 2016.